Ben McKenzie says he set out to investigate cryptocurrency’s fraud after noticing how easily people are pulled in—and argues the stakes go beyond personal losses to the stability of the wider economy.
When Ben McKenzie talks about cryptocurrency, he doesn’t start with charts or jargon. He starts with a single, unsettling idea: that people are being “bullshitting” for money—and that the harm could spread far wider than any one investor’s wallet.
In a new documentary. Everyone Is Lying to You for Money. released in April. the actor and director tries to capture how the crypto pitch works in real life.. He frames it as a story people buy into, not a system that reliably delivers value.. And after watching the industry’s rise—especially during the COVID-19 era—McKenzie says his alarm wasn’t theoretical.
“ I’m an actor. I’m also a bullshitter,” McKenzie tells Esquire. “And these guys are bullshitting us. There’s a lot of people lying to you for money.”
The film follows his own conversion from restless celebrity curiosity to something closer to a crusade. built with journalist Jacob Silverman. who first pushed him to look deeper.. McKenzie says the whole project almost began by accident.. He had taken edibles, he thought it was a good idea, and then he reached out.
“I took more edibles to summon the courage to DM Jacob Silverman,” McKenzie says, recalling the first message to the journalist. “We had beers in Brooklyn, and I convinced him to go on this journey.”
Their work became the 2023 New York Times bestseller Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud.. The documentary came later. directed and co-starring McKenzie. who helped finance it himself after he says he ran out of money.. He describes the decision as both practical and stubborn—turn a camera on and see what happens.
The result is a 90-minute comedy with dick jokes and poop emojis. McKenzie says. but also a film that refuses to treat crypto fraud as a distant scandal.. The first day of filming. he recounts. was in 2022 at South By Southwest in Austin. Texas. where Celsius executive Alex Mashinsky appeared on the floor.
McKenzie says he was shocked by what he saw: Celsius was being sued by multiple state regulators, and he describes the company as trying to sell people on a scheme. He then met Mashinsky himself.
“I saw Celsius, which was being sued by multiple state regulators, trying to sell people on this scheme. I was like, ‘This is shocking.’”
McKenzie says he approached Mashinsky and mic’d up for a conversation.. He calls it “bizarre. hilarious-slash-terrifying. ” likening him to “a used-car salesman.” Mashinsky’s legal fate. McKenzie notes. is now settled in federal court—he is serving twelve years in federal prison on commodities and securities fraud.
If the documentary has a consistent pulse, it’s the way McKenzie says the crypto pitch survives even after losses.. He says he isn’t trying to shame buyers who are hurt, because changing minds is, in his view, unrealistic.. Instead. he interviews people who lost life savings after investing in Celsius. and then returns to find they are still all-in elsewhere.
“And they’re still all-in on investing in crypto to fulfill their American dreams,” McKenzie says.
That persistence is where McKenzie sees the most dangerous part of the scam: not just the initial deception, but what comes after. He calls it sunk-cost fallacy—and he argues that the public’s reaction often turns moral.
“When people are scammed, we judge,” he says. “We go, ‘You should have known.’ I don’t look at it that way.”
He says crypto appeals across financial literacy levels, adding that it draws in “high, medium, and low financial literacy,” and that plenty of smart people believe it—though, in his words, “I think they’re wrong.”
His fear, he says, now extends beyond retail losses and into the political economy. With the Trump administration embracing crypto, McKenzie worries about how deeply the industry has embedded itself.
“If there’s a downturn, which there may will be with a war and slowing economy, crypto can crash again,” he says. “But this time it could take the whole system down. We’d all end up bailing these jerks out.”
That timing matters inside the film’s own ending, which McKenzie says lands on a reflective note: it’s “just a story.” He explains that the documentary’s wrap coincides with his diminishing budget and the difficulty of turning a moving target into a clean conclusion.
A postscript “Where Are They Now?” ends with Trump saying, “Have fun with bitcoin,” pointing to Trump’s turn toward crypto in 2024. McKenzie also describes the music choice—“Joining a Cult,” a song he says captures how easy it is to stop thinking for yourself.
It’s a point that sits alongside McKenzie’s broader warning that the story changes shape faster than regulators or investors can keep up. He says crypto began by claiming it was opposed to government and didn’t need regulation, but now it is “begging Trump” for favorable rules.
“It said it was decentralized. It’s not,” McKenzie says. “It’s lie after lie, but that’s not going to stop.”
He also names a problem he says people overlook: crypto isn’t just a personal risk. He calls it an issue for democracy, and he points to the wider failures of the political system that, in his view, allow these scams to flourish.
“The real takeaway is about us,” he says. “We live in the wealthiest society in the history of mankind. Yet parents can’t afford childcare, people don’t have health care.”
McKenzie connects that anger to the film’s emotional center. He includes interviews with victims of Celsius and speaks directly about what the process meant for his family—balancing his life with his wife, actress Morena Baccarin, and his role as a father.
He says “it was hard,” and while he acknowledges it wasn’t as hard as what victims endured, he wanted the audience to understand the toll of chasing the truth.
He also brings a background that, in his mind, explains why he was drawn to the industry’s underlying mechanics.. McKenzie has an economics degree from the University of Virginia and says he was influenced by Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Schiller. especially Schiller’s concept of naturally-occurring Ponzi schemes—where speculative prices rise beyond value and spiral through belief.
In the film, McKenzie interviews Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX founder now serving 25 years in prison for wire fraud and conspiracy. He describes the documentary’s pattern of fraud as something larger than any single company.
Asked what he sees as a common thread among crypto buyers, he doesn’t treat it as a niche obsession.. He says “fifteen-ish percent of the American public has bought cryptocurrency. ” roughly “40 million Americans. ” and adds that the group is “predominantly male.” He links crypto with gambling and argues that crypto isn’t selling a product—only projections of hopes and dreams.
“The real takeaway is about us,” he repeats, describing the scam as more than money lost. He says families collapse emotionally because shame and guilt push people away from the conversation.
As for where crypto stands now—two years after the film’s endpoint—McKenzie says the market is “kind of down and out.” He argues it will survive as long as people keep buying the story.
He also warns that the danger has shifted.. In his view. stablecoins are where things get most precarious: they trade on the value of a dollar. yet he says they aren’t backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. making them “a black market dollar.” He adds an estimate from a crypto company that he says indicates $150 billion of illegal activity was facilitated using cryptocurrency in 2025.
McKenzie’s bottom line is blunt and bluntly repeated throughout his documentary’s messaging: “Some people win, most people lose. It’s gambling in an unregulated casino.”
When he’s asked about one of the film’s most important lines—“As long as people keep buying the story, crypto will keep selling it”—McKenzie says it came from experimentation, from editors urging him to step back and tell it so people who don’t know anything can still follow.
He calls crypto “just a story,” and he says the story keeps changing—so fast that even the narrative itself becomes part of the trap.
Ben McKenzie Everyone Is Lying to You for Money cryptocurrency fraud Easy Money Jacob Silverman Celsius Alex Mashinsky Sam Bankman-Fried stablecoins Trump and bitcoin